Hello All,
What methods do you use to backup your server? Do you perform backups, or just leave the clients to sort things out?

I have found that the more backups available then the more your life is made easier when something will break.

Ideally I want to jump to a SCSI Raid setup. Here in the office we had a drive die recently and the server stayed functional because the spare automatically kicked in. All I did was unplug the broken drive, put in a new drive and hit a few buttons and a little time after the new drive was restored ZERO Downtime!!!

What other methods do you take to make sure backups are done and safe?

We have SQL Server log shipping on our DB servers. That's quite nifty. We log to an offsite server so we will never lose more than 5 minutes of data if the worst should happen.

Very nice! Might have to take a look at that. I think that would be in demand by a number of clients in the hosting business.

Hi,

Well, we recommend our customers to have a secondary HD, and we set it up as a mirror (every three days) and "booteable", for faster recoveries.

Also, all of our managed servers' customers enjoy our fully automated, off-server backup system, where we perform daily incremental backups and full backups every 7 days.

That setup has worked for both us and our customers over the years.

Regards,

Jaime

SQL Server log shipping's not a new idea I first used it with SQL 6.5 back in late 1999 of course there was no wizard (SQL 2000) or resource kit template script (SQL 7), but it was a good TSQL coding exercise, it was reliable and saved our bacon on several occasions.

I find rsync to a remote server is a good option for normal backups.

Can't beat a good RAID card & hot swap drives with a warm spare in the drive bay combined with an alerting system so that you get a helpdesk ticket telling you that the spare's been used and you need to swap the failed drive.